I just spent several days talking with scientists and lecturing in Australia. The summer months (our winter months) are a wonderful time to travel Down Under. The cities are lively, the sun is out, and people are in cheerful mood—which is amplified just a little more in Australia than I most places in the world.…
Did you miss the “Neuroplasticity and Healing” Summit with the Dalai Lama, Dr. Michael Merzenich, Dr. Edward Taub, and Norman Doidge? Or did you find the video feed a bit lengthy and hard to understand? The wonderful Brain Science Podcast–long on the top of our “great neuroscience podcasts” lists–has created an excellent episode featuring highlights…
I am incredibly excited to announce that the scientists who ran the ACTIVE trial have reported that certain types of brain training—including one of the exercises in BrainHQ from Posit Science—can drive cognitive benefits that last 10 years. The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society is the first to show such…
I’m excited to announce that my brand new book Soft-Wired is now out and available in paperback or Kindle format. This book was a labor of love, and it took me many years and many iterations to say exactly what I wanted, how I wanted to say it. The result is a book that covers…
If you’re old enough, you may remember a time, maybe back in your childhood, when someone measured your intelligence and assigned a number to it. I suspect that you have been either proud of that “IQ,” or perhaps a little bit chagrined about it, from that day to this. The general belief back then was that intelligence was a genetic endowment, along with eye color or a propensity for baldness.
We now know this is simply not true. Your brain — every brain — is a work in progress. It is “plastic.” From the day we’re born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it. If a brain is exercised properly, anyone can grow intelligence, at any age, and potentially by a lot. Or you can just let your brain idle — and watch it slowly, inexorably, go to seed like a sedentary body.
I woke up in a cheerful mood this morning because yesterday the results of a scientific study were published and they once again demonstrated that very strong benefits can be achieved through only 10 hours of Posit Science brain training. The cognitive benefits were not just seen in the tasks themselves, but in measures of…